The upcoming OpenSUSE 10.2 will feature a new KDE start menu with favorites and integrated search and application browser. It was developed by the KDE SUSE team after doing extensive usability testing on existing start menus - there will be a talk about it at aKademy 2006 next month. Note: The 2nd link has been updated, pointing to an alternative location. It works now.

No your not - I love KDE - using SuSE now mostly for the last 6 years - but IMO a lot of the icons & window decos are too colourful & "playful" looking .

Whereas I find it hard to make GNOME look lively & colourful like KDE - GNOME to me just feels way slicker - more professional .

GNOME looks more "plain" I guess - with less options .

But very much looking forward to KDE V 4

& Generaly the improvements of new GNOME & Xorg

THX for update : Looks cool - it would be perfect were it to be hanging from a top bar with the tabs at the top as well .
Similiar to the GNOME one used in SLES 10.
The "All programs" tab needs some severe work - maybe some locations indication of where one is in the menu like in nautilus windows .

I agree. I think KDE's menu is a bit cartoony. I like this new concept though.

What I really would like however is to customize what is presented within the tabs. Basically I guess I'd just want multipe "Favorites" tabs and then I'd use All Programs for the lesser used apps. Get rid of the Recent list since that's pretty much what the favorites would be anyway.

As far as the cartoony look, I'd go for a bit more subdued color scheme. Do away with that yellow star, darken the icons and lessen or chuck the gradients in the All Programs and Leave icons.

I agree that KDE's (and QT apps) worst thing is their look when compared to Gnome/GTK.

I am among the ones who think that KDE is technically superior to Gnome, but don't use it because I don't like its look. So I stick to XFCE and GTK apps.

If they could make KDE/QT look more professional and have a bit better fonts, it would probably become the DE of choice of some big ones again. RHEL for example, uses Gnome but includes lots of QT apps in their default install.

Do you ever think that may be KDE doesn't suite your personality, behavior, taste, or whatever?

Calling a DE is wrong in every default, because lots of it doesn't suite your preference is just wrong.

I use Gnome occasionally, at first it looks beautiful, but after sometime it looks bland. And I don't like it. But I won't call it wrong, just different preference of taste. So I don't use Gnome anymore. It just offer different kind of experience that doesn't suite me.
That's all.

Sidenote: I think a lot of people see things in black and white, right or wrong, false or true in area that supposed to be seen as preference or taste.

I'm kind of wondering that myself. The way I setup KDE looks rather different from the defaults. Not that I think the defaults are so atrocious and all that, it's just that tastes differ. The beauty of KDE is the extent that it allows me to do this, without having jump through fire and hoops. Open control center, customize to hearts content. It's really not rocket science.

Also, don't confuse SUSE KDE and actual KDE, SUSE puts in a bunch of their own little hacks and such, which is quite fine, they're certainly allowed to do that, but one shouldn't judge KDE's actual 'default' by looking solely at SUSE's.

No, I prefer a sort of minimalist plain look - almost any of the Gnome themes. But what I notice is, its what you start with. A friend, who by accident I started on KDE back in the days of Mandrake 9.x, is just used to the look and really doesn't want to change. The people who started on Gnome however prefer that. It would probably be hard to even change the Gnome people to xfce however similar looking it is.

People, once they have got used to a look on their desktop, seem to want to stay with it.

People, once they have got used to a look on their desktop, seem to want to stay with it.

I used KDE for two years (Suse), thinking Gnome sucked, but now I went to Gnome 2.14 and I'll stick with it. I like the default looks and layout, menu on the top, the way windows look when you minimize them, and the simplicity. Configure something, no dozens of KDE/Windows style "apply" buttons, it's just done (OSX style). I guess more people try out more DEs before sticking with one.
Unless, of course, they don't know how to install another DE.

And XFCE is just a little too limited and not intuitive enough (yet?).

About the new KDE menu? I don't really like big menus. I prefer ALT F2 and typing a few letters. That'll start most apps for me.

Define 'cartoony' and 'professional' in terms that mean something in a usability sense before you make a comment like that, or just don't bother at all. I may be the only one who is getting sick of seeing words like 'cartoony', 'professional' or 'clean' used with no justification in 'professional' terms whatsoever, or I may not.

We've even got people who claim they like the look of GTK better (pardon?) and that KDE should use better fonts. Errr, the fonts on your system have nothing to do with the desktop and everything to do with what's installed.

On the other hand I could quite reasonably say that Gnome has a very, very bland colourset that few users who are unfamiliar with KDE or Gnome actually like and find it limited in its functionality.

I could also find gaping holes in Gnome's usability and their HIG (one day I may write something on it) by asking why on Earth some of their applet windows merely have a 'close' button, with no way of cancelling any changes and exiting.

I could also ask why the functionality of some of their apps are so limited, and why I don't have a way of selecting a theme, customising it and having a proper preview of the style, window decoration and colours before I commit.

"On the other hand I could quite reasonably say that Gnome has a very, very bland colourset that few users who are unfamiliar with KDE or Gnome actually like and find it limited in its functionality.
"

Hey, that's why i truly hate Windows XP Luna interface and KDE.

Windows 2000, good old classic interface, looks so much better than Luna and KDE.

This is where i think gnome deserve the word "clean". It's "clean", not "flashy". No 3000 colors beating my eyes. No cartoony icons. This "bland" colourset, you name it, is the reason why i love the Gnome interface.

Kde users just don't understand taste. Old kde shipped with the worst theme linux ever saw and it destroyed its reputation for me. http://www.kde.org/screenshots/images/3.1/fullsize/3.png
Keramik, how can ANYONE love that ? abused bevel buttons, in-your-face colors, too much relief in the "close, maximize" button in the windows.. plastik is much better, but it's light years from Gnome themes.

GNOME, like Mac OS and BeOS, uses instant-apply for preferences windows. KDE, like Windows, doesn't, which is probably why GNOME feels a little different to you. You could write something about it to the devs but I doubt it would have any effect, because instant-apply kicks so much ass.

As for limited functionality, that is not the goal of GNOME. Perhaps if you file a bug you'll be able to do work that you can't do now with GNOME.

You could write something about it to the devs but I doubt it would have any effect, because instant-apply kicks so much ass.

I'm afraid it doesn't. If you have any sort of applet window that is anything other than really basic, where you can remember the changes made, it is almost impossible for you to role the canges back manually - and that's what you have to do.

Additionally, the word 'close' gives no indication whatsoever that your changes will be applied.

Funny thing about that. Way back when, when fvwm2, fmvm95, and the Anotherlevel theme were cool, I discovered KDE 1.0. It looked great. Then Gnome 1.0 came along, and I was really embarrassed for it. I thought the icons looked really amateurish. I remember someone commenting that they liked Gnome's icons but thought that KDE's looked cartoonish. I couldn't understand what they were talking about.

Fast forward a bit. RedHat introduced Bluecurve. I switched to Gnome about that time, and I thought it looked so very plain and ugly. But after using it a while. I really grew to like it. Very smart and business-like. I like the current Gnome defaults for the same reason as I liked Bluecurve. Very professional looking.

From time to time, I try out a distro that uses KDE as its default desktop. And for the whole time I am using it, I just can't get over how comical, and yes, cartoonish the artwork looks to me. I know it's silly, because I should be paying attention to functionality more than looks. But it keeps me from taking KDE as seriously as I might otherwise.

So the "funny thing about that" that I'm wondering about is this:

Is is that KDE's style has changed? Gnomes style? Or have my tastes just changed?

I think it's pretty cool, and could be a lot easier to use than the current menu. I do hope that they do something about the look of the menu itself, especially the gradient in the background looks a bit annoying.

This is exciting to see. I am pretty much a KDE exclusive user, so this is an exciting read for me. With the way the Novell R&D/Developement team, or whoever it was in Novell, ripped out the GNOME menu and designed their own, I thought they really helped make GNOME much more usable to the lay person. I tried the free download of SLED 10 and booted into GNOME, and I thought the menu was very nice and could almost, almost, take on KDE on SLED's GNOME menu alone. So to see their great work from that and now they are going to try to work on something for KDE, I am excited. I'm sure a few of all y'alls out there are too. I am more of a BSD person myself, just not happy with the state of of Linux, it's filing system, etc. But OpenSUSE I can completely support with whatever they do, because of the direction they seem to trying to take this distro.

It's excellent that Novell/SuSE are getting stuck into some KDE developments after all the worries that they were going Gnome-centric. This is only a rough draft and maybe KDE 4 will bring a different look and feel from the KDE 3 "Crystal era" anyway? But it's all good news to me.

I like it and I am sure many KDE users will because the menu has been one of the few things many hardcore KDE users complained about (hence the huge uptake of kbfx). The only thing I can't really figure out is how Suses effort fits in with the vision for KDE 4 because KDE 4 is supposed to be sporting a brand spanking new menu.

Since the functions used by the Suse team would probably remain the same in KDE4 and the Suse menu is a separate program I really don't see how the shift from KDE3 to 4 would affect Suse much. Worst case is that a small part of the code would have to be rewritten usign the new handles for the KDE4 menu. Only this takes a very small amount of time and is a relativelly easy fix. Of course all this would be pointless of the KDE team and Suse come to and agreement on what the KDE menu is supposed to look like. (which I'm really hoping for)

I agree with the fact that there is no reason to limit yourself to a small corner of the screen. The scroll bars in the start menu where simply a bad design. When you're accessing something from the start menu you generally don't need to also see the desktop or any other window, so why not grow the start menu to the needed size.

That being said I think the concepts shown are great. If they can be developed a bit I think it will become really useful.

I would tend to agree. One thing I can't stand when I'm using GNOME (as I am while I'm typing this), is the fact that in menu items with a lot of content I have to manually scroll through to see all the listings. With KDE's menu, plop, it's all there.

I'm not sure who came up with the idea that hunting through menus is a good idea (like "personalized" menus in windows).

I could see arguments on either side of the issue. I am pretty much am a KDE exclusive user for quite some time. I don't buy the whole "too cartoonish" argument. Regardless I like to try it out before I make the judgement call. Seems to be an intriguing idea.

Wow nice to see that someone is really thinking about usability in KDE. Ok, this is really not a fair statement when you consider all that's being done for KDE4 but KDE3 has been such a pain for the longest time. Anyway, I really like this Startmenu concept and especially the ease of moving items arround. This is one of the few things that no OSS desktop environment does better than Windows. But it looks there's a change comming. Way to go Suse/Novell

I use openSUSE with KDE 90% of the time. After playing with SLED, seeing how much work went into Gnome (and how KDE was really no different than openSUSE) I was worried that KDE was going to be neglected. This shows I was wrong.

Get rid of "my computer" tab completely. So wrong. It's a start menu, not a desktop itself.

You realise you want to see access to your disks relegated to the desktop itself, the least accessible part when you got applications running?
I consider putting anything on the desktop literally counter-productive.

let's be frank, any start menu under linux, be it gnome or KDE has been up to this point a)more or less the same all the time b) too much like the good old win95 start menu. seeing that somebody now finally tries to find some new appoaches to the start menu thing is a good sign! personally I think the gnome menu is ok, if it's used in an intelligent way like in ubuntu, and not cluttered with useless duplicates like in the last OpenSuse I tried, but I think it can be improved. What Novell did is maybe not perfect, but certainly a step ahead, it opens the way for new ideas!
btw... one thing I always hated (and still do hate) in osx is that there is no menu to launch your apps... and the dock is not a good replacement for it...

Plastik is soooo nice. Also i might add that i have never had a panel in a xfree/xorg more than the time it takes for me to remove it. I dont understand what to use them for? all i need is the alt+r run command and im set. =) Seriously what do you use the bars and crap for?.... Well there is the systray but that can be placed on the desktop to get more working space. And the k-menu is kinda worthless unless you dont know what all your apps names are. *lol* As for the "taskbar" i dont know what to say but "waste of space". Well atleast its not windows-explorer and all the stuf i dont want can be removed. But what ever makes the OpenSuSE and kde guys and gals happy, i guess makes me happy too.

having this menu out in the wild previous to kde4 will give us a chance to field test it and determine if this is a direction we want to go for kde4. kbfx is a similar effort in that regard.

for the doubters, this menu has actually been usability tested with "regular users" in the lab. a lot of changes were made as a direct result of those experiments. sometimes those changes run against one's intuition but actually work for people. i find a lot of armchair usability folk tend to pay more attention to intuition and "stuff i've read" than user input. this menu was designed with a user-first mentality; we'll see how it fares in opensuse.

having used it myself, i'm actually fairly impressed with how well it works.

as for the look, yes, i expect the visuals to be rather different in kde4 even if this menu layout is what gets adopted.

I actually kinda like it. Not enough to give up XFCE, but still, not bad. The only problem is the "My Computer" thing. If KDE is supposedly not intended to be a Windows clone, please stop beating users over the head with Windowsisms.

Nice to see that Novell haven't axed KDE totally - I was really afraid of that.

But I really don't care much for the feel of the result - it's too damn Vista'ish. That combined with the "My Computer" folder objects, the Windows term localisation translations and increasing heavy use of Mono applications - should make SUSE a bit more attractive for current Windows users.

I dunno - perhaps I'll give PC-BSD a spin, with the new installer instead.

But I really don't care much for the feel of the result - it's too damn Vista'ish.

How would you rate the current layout then, too damn Windows95-ish?

IMO the proposed one is less similar to any version of Windows than the current one is to Windows pre-XP.

Also, I believe the video doesn't show a final version. I never had a high opinion of Novell's slab from looking at their mock-ups, it looked too much like XP. "looked" being the keyword there, because now that I've tried it I can't go back to the old GNOME layout.

Generally, happy to see usability improvements. Also nice to see KDE improvements from the company that supposedly abandoned KDE. KDE is my preferred environment (I'm far less likely to encounter "I'm sorry Dave, you can't do that" when customizing KDE), but it's frequently a bit *too* much like windows.

Of course, having said that, I'm usually hitting Alt-F1, "/" and a couple characters to pick the app I want, then hitting right arrow a few times followed by enter.

I'm probably not a typical user.

KDE gives me MUCH more in the way of flexibility, both in configuring the desktop, the window behavior, and the appearance of the UI. And keyboard shortcuts. Lots of keyboard shortcuts. It's one of the things that keeps me from using XGL/Compiz-- I lose too many features I like.

Ideally, the old menu will still be around and functioning for those of us who just use it to keep our icons from piling up.

It is normal to see people exclaim frantically how gladly they would give up breadth of functionality for "nice defaults." After all, many people forego the stove for the simplicity of a toaster.

It is not normal when shelow cooking skills and low expectations of variation of out become equated to "style".

I see the battle of KDE vs. Gnome as a battle of "people who can cook" and "toaster-operators". Which is not good vs bad, but a question of your needs are.

Theoretically, KDE should NOT have a default look, because KDE doesn't have a "default" distribution. The default in the source is like a blank canvas. The defaults are there for distros to tweak and tailor for the user. Many (mostly young, based on my experience in computer services filed) users actually like "blank" canvas and gladly personalize it given the means. If you say that KDE's "default" has no style, you are saying that you have no personal sense of style or skill to put it in.

"The only thing I can't really figure out is how Suses effort fits in with the vision for KDE 4 because KDE 4 is supposed to be sporting a brand spanking new menu."

It's pretty simple. The brand spanking new menu in KDE4 is the KDE Team's vision. This is Novells vision. If Novell thinks their implementation is better than that menu, they'll replace it with their own... they'll use what they think works best. What's so confusing about that?